With the sound of heavy machinery in the background, residents and volunteers battle mud to help with reconstruction of a ruined town.

Darlene Kirby says she's stunned more than anything after losing all her belongings -- antiques, books, computers, clothes -- as flood waters rose to the main level of her home in High River, Alta. "If you don't laugh, you cry," she says.

HIGH RIVER, ALTA.—Everywhere there are exhausted people caked with mud.

Clad in disposable coveralls or plain clothes, they go in and out of homes as if on a conveyor belt, hauling once valuable belongings to waste heaps outside.

This once quiet town south of Calgary is overrun with volunteers armed with sledgehammers, crowbars and their bare hands to help residents clean up after a devastating flood.

The scene at High River is chaotic. It’s been two weeks since the Highwood River burst its banks, forcing the evacuation of the town’s 13,000 residents and leaving most of it under water.

These days, there are droves of pickup trucks hauling men, some with cigarettes sticking out of their mouths, others with dust masks dangling around their necks, to their next assignment. Driveway after driveway is covered with stacks of wooden beams, drywall, insulation, appliances, furniture and mounds of mud.

In a field in the middle of a subdivision, Koreann Bland runs a food distribution network, an operation that offers a glimpse into the scope of the volunteer effort and the generosity that pervades it.

Bland’s team has cooked enough beef — more than 300 kilograms of it — to feed sandwiches to an estimated 3,300 people and, by midday one recent afternoon, she was halfway through the stock. Eight buses drop off sandwiches and water to anyone working inside High River homes.

“We figured that if we ever needed help, we’d want them to do them the same for us,” says Bland, a financial adviser who hails from the town of Strathmore, east of Calgary.

An estimated 2,000 volunteers have descended on High River by the busload on this day of cleanup, said Farrah Khoja, who is helping co-ordinate the effort.

Nearly 70 per cent of High River residents have been allowed to return, according to town hall. Still, some neighbourhoods remain off limits. That means some residents, though back in town, will have to stay for the time being in hotels, university campuses and temporary communities set to open Sunday and on July 13.

For those allowed inside their homes, there is heartache, but also hope. Around the corner from Bland’s sandwich depot on the west side of town, a For Sale sign juts out of a pile of mud in Darlene Kirby’s driveway. It’s an injection of humour into what has been a tiring slog of rooting through the damage.

“Anything in the mud you can buy, all at a great price,” Kirby jokes. “If you don’t laugh, you cry.”

Kirby’s basement was heavily damaged after floodwaters rose to her home’s main floor. Antiques, signed first-edition books, computers, clothes — all washed away. Her belongings are torn apart, lying in heaps behind her, waiting for heavy equipment to load them into giant metal bins before they’re hauled way.

“I’m just stunned more than anything,” she says. “What can you do? You start over. It’s an adventure. That’s what my friend says. A new adventure.”

Across the street, Kevin Oler empties muddy brown water from his rubber boots after a fellow volunteer hosed him down to get rid of the dirt caked on his slacks and blue button-up shirt.

A pair of plastic goggles over his forehead, his face speckled with mud, he’s been hauling waterlogged carpets and drywall out of a house for hours.

“I felt almost guilt,” Oler says. “No one in my neighbourhood, no one around me was affected. I just thought I should do something and I came down to experience this.”

High River has been turned upside down, the quiet replaced by the roar of heavy equipment and truck traffic, but the sense of community prevails. It’s not unusual to walk down the street and have a stranger throw you a sandwich or at least share a smile, an acknowledgement that, regardless of where you come from, everyone is in it together.

“I’ve gotten to know my neighbours better than I ever did, helping each other and doing what we can,” says Perry Smith. “A lot of good in that sense has come from it. But it’s disheartening to see a home that you had set up exactly the way you wanted it and now half of it’s gone and you’ve got to start over.”

Smith and his family were rescued from their flooded home in the bucket of a front-end loader. Sludge and dirty water sat untouched in his basement for eight or nine days.

Knowing the big risk of mould infestation in a home he shares with two grandchildren, he’s not taking any chances. He’s having the lower floor completely gutted, the remnants of a life his family shared there now strewn across his driveway.

Scott Finney and a crew of fellow volunteers and demolition workers lug plastic boxes filled with mud, a toilet, a furnace and a hot water tank to the curb. His white disposable coveralls have turned brown under the heavy toil of the day’s work.

Earlier in the week, he was in his grandparents’ former Calgary home — where he met with family as a boy — gutting it for the current owner.

On this day, the school teacher is sweating, getting dirty and testing his muscles against the laborious call of duty, for complete strangers in High River.

“You feel a bit better as you get through each stage in the process, but at the same time it’s overwhelming to think about what the people have to go through and the money that they’re going to have to spend just to rebuild their homes,” he says.

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